Download a package from npm as a tar (not installing it to a module)

Question

Is there some URL from which I can download a given package from npm (as a tarball or something)? I need the exact files that were originally uploaded to npm.

Using

Answer 1

If you need to get the tarball without having npm installed, you can fetch the package information using curl and use jq to get the right information from the JSON:

curl https://registry.npmjs.org/PACKAGE-NAME/ \
    | jq '.versions[."dist-tags".latest].dist.tarball'

This is for instance useful if you're building a Docker container that requires one npm package, and don't want to install npm just for that.

Answer 2

You can use npm view to get the URL to the registry's tarball (in this example for the module level):

$ npm view level dist.tarball

And to download tarball, you can use npm pack:

$ npm pack level

Answer 3

Yes, you can npm install <git remote URL> to download the full repository into node_modules. This will be directly from the repository's host, rather than via npm, though. See the npm install docs for more information.

Answer 4

Just run the command

npm view [package name] dist.tarball

It will return a tar url.

Answer 5

Running npm pack PACKAGE_NAME will download a tarball of any package on npm.

To extract it, just run tar -xzf DOWNLOADED_FILE.tgz

Example:

npm pack react

then extract:

tar -xzf react-16.6.3.tgz